Chapter 11

CHRISTMAS 1944

On December 14 Christine was admitted to the hospital. She was three and a half months pregnant and a miscarriage had resulted in severe internal hemorrhaging. The doctor had said she would probably remain in the hospital until New Year's. We were both very disappointed over the loss of this most wanted, much prayed for, baby. We knew that the poor quality and small quantity of food made it more difficult on the mother but Christine felt that she was as strong and healthy as others, whose camp-born babies were thriving. So after two doctors had examined Christine and given us their O.K., we felt at peace. Why the fetus miscarried we do not understand but we can rest in the confidence that we will someday be with our precious child in heaven.

The prospect of celebrating Christmas with my wife in the hospital was not a pleasant one. Sandra, now age four, often had to answer roll call with the declaration, "My daddy's working in the kitchen, and my mommy's in the hospital. She's got a bazeese"

Still, under these most dismal of circumstances, we experienced what in many ways remains the most beautiful and memorable Christmas of our lives. Here is Christine's account of it as it appeared in Christian Life Magazine, 1971, under the title, "P.O.W. Christmas":

When I came to consciousness that chilly Christmas morning, I could almost feel the gray light seeping through the window just above my head. I turned to look out at the great stretches of brick wall, bristling with strands of electrified barbed wire and broken at intervals by menacing sentry towers, manned by one of the omnipresent, olive-uniformed Japanese guards.

This was December 25, 1944, and I was lying on a rough grass mattress in the camp hospital, where I had been taken two weeks earlier for internal bleeding. An adjoining building served as a barracks for the mentally ill, and not far away lay a melancholy plot of ground which enfolded the swelling population of our dead. How much longer would we have to endure this ordeal? Not one of us knew. Few dared guess. Hope was hard to come by that bleak December. But this morning would be different, must be different. This was Christmas Day!

Now the pale morning light, like a persistent hand, was stirring patients from their fitful sleep. Beside me I could hear the moans of an older woman suffering from pleurisy. Beyond her another patient, a pneumonia case, struggled for breath. Directly across from me a young mother was apparently dying of some sort of fever.

There were 16 beds and 16 patients in that barn-like, women's ward. The once well-furnished hospital had been left a shambles by troops who had been quartered there after the Japanese occupation. Now the building was crudely sectioned off into two large wards. Heroic doctors and nurses, themselves prisoners, gave unstintingly of their skill. But with few medicines available, too often their best efforts ended in futility. For the most part the old hospital served only to quarantine the sick and dying from the still-functioning members of our community.

From his job in the kitchen, Meredith was permitted today to take one hour off between breakfast and lunch. We had agreed that he would bring Sandra and the gifts to my bedside. Here, in this precious segment of time we would celebrate Christmas together. And though I was still very weak, my heart warmed with wonderful anticipation.

My gift for Meredith that Christmas was to be a well-thumbed, but still-sturdy copy of Matthew's Chinese-English Dictionary, a book he had long coveted but never felt we could afford. I had discovered it at the "White Elephant," a brick cubicle where outgrown and expendable commodities could be sold or bartered. The price was a full $7. For us, that was a lot of money at any time, but in camp, where a rare "monthly" Red Cross allowance of $5 was our only source of income, it was a fortune. I knew, however, that when the cash price for an item could not be met, the seller would often settle for the balance in acceptable barter.

What could I barter? I went to our little black foot-locker, one of the two pieces of luggage we had been permitted to bring into camp. There in the corner was all that remained of our little store of goods. Quickly I took inventory, then took out a yard of new cloth and my prized last can of strawberry jam. I had two dollars in my pocket and felt sure a friend would loan me two more. With these I purchased Matthew's Dictionary.

Now I heard Meredith's familiar footsteps approaching from the far end of the ward and looked up. He was wearing a rough plaid Mackinaw and too-short pants, both held together by patch on patch.

Sandra skipped beside him, her blonde curls bobbing, her brown eyes unnaturally large but glowing with excitement against her too-thin features. She wore dark blue overalls I had fashioned from upholstery material. Her coat had been made from the remains of a fellow missionary's tweed skirt. Together, Meredith and Sandra clutched the presents, all wrapped in used notebook paper.

"Oh, Mommy," Sandra shouted gaily, "isn't it wonderful! It's Christmas! And look, we brought presents!"

Meredith and Sandra sat beside me. A nurse thoughtfully procured the hospital's only screen and set it up against the foot of my bed for privacy. Now we were a family again. We were in our own world, and it was Christmas morning.

Meredith opened his pocket New Testament to the familiar account, "And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.... " Then we prayed.

"Mommy, Mommy, can't we open our presents now?" Sandra's thin little fingers were pulling impatiently at the stiff wraps.

Her "big gift" that Christmas was a wheelbarrow which Meredith had made from an old soap box. The single wheel had been purloined from her baby bed. The handles were scraps of wood gleaned from who knows where. Cliff, our Chefoo adoptee, had decorated the front of the barrow with a sketch of a bushy-tailed squirrel and Sandra's name in big, block letters.

By any standard it was a crude contraption that would be looked upon with contempt by today's toy-surfeited youngsters. But to a four-year-old who had never seen a dime store, an ice cream cone or a dolly that opens and closes its eyes, it was a treasure!

Sandra got other gifts too. From a scrap of cloth no longer serviceable for mending garments, I had made a Humpty-Dumpty doll and stuffed it with bits of thread and material swept from the community sewing room floor. And, before I was taken to the hospital, I was trying to put together something resembling a doll house. I had scrounged an old cardboard carton for the purpose and begged two pages of a book of wallpaper samples a neighbor had, for some unknown reason, brought with her into camp. These, with the aid of scissors and dabs of flour paste, were to have been fashioned into an exquisite doll mansion. But unfinished though it was, Sandra loved it.

"Okay, honey," Meredith said, "now come your presents. Go on, open them"

One by one I removed the sheets of notebook paper from my gifts, three small packages, all obviously the products of my husband's labor of love.

"It's a kitchen set," Meredith quickly explained, lest I had any doubt about its purpose. "How do you like it?"

Here I should tell you our "kitchen" consisted of a brick stove he had recently built in one tiny corner of block 14, No. 7 — the 9 by 12 room that was "home" to the three of us. At night, Meredith had secretly wrested bricks from the rubble of an old wall the guards had torn down from around the church. He, of course, had no tools with which to dig and made-do with any small piece of wood or part of a tree branch he could find. But the earth was packed solidly and was extremely hard. Sometimes he retrieved only one brick in an evening's work so it took weeks to gather enough. The stovepipe had been patiently assembled from 21 old tin cans. It was my job to collect those cans, which meant many trips to the dump heap and months to find them. We didn't get many cans in camp, and if one had a can, he had better keep it in case of future need or the possibility of trading it for something else. The burner, the most difficult part to procure, was a thick metal tile form. For it we had paid the exorbitant price of two full cans of evaporated milk. But what a difference that "kitchen" made! During the winter we would take our half-bucket allotment of coal dust, mix it with clay and roll it into small balls, baking them in the sun. Then we would buy whatever edible items there might be in the small camp canteen. Thus we managed to supplement the wearisome, half-palatable, mess-hall diet, which so often consisted of delights such as worm-ridden bread, fish soup and a dark porridge of kaoliang.

The first item in my kitchen set was a baking pan (not that anyone would have succeeded in identifying it as such). It had originally been an oversized sardine tin, of the sort our White Russian neighbors sometimes received in packages. The rough edges had been lovingly smoothed, and small handles fastened at each end. Now, when our birthdays came and we got the promised two-cup ration of flour (though we seldom did), we could have a birthday cake!

The next implement was a spatula, made of real rubber. Meredith didn't tell me until later that it had been carefully whittled from a discarded boot heel, a bonanza he had discovered in the camp trash heap. Completing the set was a tea strainer. Afterwards I learned that the patch of screening from which the gift was devised was the remnant of a carefully scrubbed and well-boiled fly swatter!

My gift to Meredith was received with genuine amazement (though with a stern rebuke for my extravagance), but his delight repaid me many times over for my scheming.

The hour was over. Meredith kissed me and rose to leave. Sandra flung her arms around me. "Mommy, Mommy, hurry up and get well so you can come back home," she said. Then they were gone. Quietly I fingered the three objects on my bed — my kitchen set, my Christmas presents. Down the ward someone hummed, "Oh Come All Ye Faithful, Joyful and Triumphant." No carol had ever sounded sweeter.

God has given many blessed Christmases since that dark December day in Weihsien, but nothing we have ever received has been more precious than those crude gifts.

What made those inherently worthless bits so inestimably dear to us? It was much more than just their utility at a time when we possessed practically nothing. That Christmas, in the giving of those poor objects, we were really giving ourselves. Each gift, so painstakingly thought out and put together, eloquently said, "I love you, I love you." And this is the real meaning of Christmas, for in Jesus God gave the most precious gift of all. And in so doing He said to the whole world, "I love you"

And that's what Christmas is all about."

" Reprinted by permission from Christian Life Magazine, copyright December 1971; Christian Life Incorporated, Gunderson Drive and Schmale Road, Wheaton, Illinois 60187.

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